"Exposing Western hypocrisy - how
much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on Earth harbours any illusions
about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of
others.Colonialism, apartheid,
slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually
invented it all. They have plundered nations, snuffed out civilisations,
exterminated entire populations. They stand on the world's stage stark naked
but entirely unembarrassed, because they know that they have more money, more
food and bigger bombs than anybody else" ("The Cost of Living"
by Arundhati Roy, Flamingo, 1999, p144; Roy is also the author of the acclaimed
novel "The God of Small Things").

During the period 1965-69, and
especially during 1965-66, a series of mass murders took place in Indonesia
which led to the institution in power of President Suharto and the opening up
of the country to Western capitalism. Possibly more than a million people were
slaughtered. In the documentary film on globalisation by John Pilger, "The
New Rulers of the World" (2001 - screened on TV1, 10/10/01), there are
scenes of some of the relatives of the victims of the massacres secretly
exhuming the bones of their loved ones. As Pilger notes, evidence has
increasingly come to light of the murderous role that the US and British
governments performed both in initiating and in helping perpetrate the
killings, and in the creation of the long reign of terror that ensued. The full
story amounts to a remarkable and chilling record of capitalist genocide,
cover-up, and subsequent foundation of a model which was then widely applied
elsewhere in the Third World to eliminate the enemies of the West and ensure
future profits. To a quite considerable extent, the new rulers of the world
built capitalist success on the Indonesian genocide, and the platform it served
for globalising Indonesia and the rest of the planet.

To date, the true story of what really
happened is only partially told, only partly visible through a fog of
propaganda and deception, and a dearth of information.However, trying to help unravel it, and to
disclose it to a wider audience, is to embark on a greatly enlightening journey
into the human psyche, into the political economy of capitalism, and into the
meaning of the Western tradition of the Enlightenment today - the values of
freedom, democracy, justice, truth, and respect for human rights.One comes face to face with the reality and
psychology of political ideology, violence and civilised values, and what these
mean in relation to the philosophical concept of truth. In such matters, if any
conception of "truth" has an inevitable, insoluble element of
subjectivism, there is always the question of the actual facts in the most
fundamental and reportorial sense: who was killed by whom, where, how and
why?

This article certainly does not purport
to be a systematic review of present knowledge about the Indonesian killings of
1965-69. It is prompted in part by the writer's own personal experience of a
continuing cover-up about the massacres. In part, too, as intimated, it stems
from a wish to help draw greater attention to what really happened; and what it
has meant in terms of later events in parts of the Third World; and,
importantly for the future, what it is likely to mean following President
Bush's proclamation of the "war on terrorism" and the current reality
of the US war on Afghanistan. It is basically an overview addressing a subject
that has got far too little investigation over the years - a subject with
implications now more urgent than ever in the era we entered on September 11,
2001. If the destiny of Indonesia for more than 30 years was decided in late
1965, its New Order was a harbinger of the New World Order announced by the
first President Bush during the 1991 Gulf War. Symbolically, as well, its
plunge into disorder is now representative of the New World Disorder in the
time of Bush junior.

A Western Conspiracy Of Silence

The lack of investigation of the
Indonesian genocide has been due to a range of reasons but the central reason
has undoubtedly been the huge vested interest of both the Suharto regime and
ruling Western forces in leaving the past undisturbed. "Western
governments and much of the Western media preferred Suharto and the New Order
to the PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] and the Old, and have been in many
cases comfortable with the simple statement that some hundreds of thousands of
'Communists' were killed. A close investigation of who was being killed - and
why - ran the risk not just of complicating a simple story but of uncovering
skeletons in the New Order closet" ("The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966:
Studies from Bali and Java", edited by Robert Cribb, Monash Papers on
Southeast Asia, no.21, 1990, pp. 5, 6). Instead: "If anything, the
Indonesian killings have been treated as if they fall into an anomalous
category of 'accidental' mass death" (ibid, p16).

More specifically, a number of Western
organisations - most eminently, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - ran
from the start a carefully calculated disinformation campaign to mislead, and
confuse any close scrutiny of the massacres. Pretext for the genocide was given
by a failed coup on September 30, 1965.The coup affair was apparently a venture by some young, middle-ranking
officers to overthrow the existing Army high command. They might have feared
the Army's generals were about to stage their own coup to topple President
Sukarno, and therefore decided to strike first. Allegations of Communist
involvement were quickly made when in actuality the PKI was innocent of this.
Media fabrications whipped up fear and hatred towards the Communists and other
alleged subversives. Former CIA agent, Ralph McGehee, who visited Aotearoa/NZ
in 1986, has revealed how: "To conceal its role in the massacre of those
innocent people the CIA, in 1968, concocted a false account of what happened (later
published by the Agency as a book, "Indonesia-1965: The Coup that
Backfired") . . .At the same time
that the Agency wrote the book, it also composed a secret study of what really
happened. [One sentence deleted] The Agency was extremely proud of its successful
[one word deleted] and recommended it as a model for future operations
[one-half sentence deleted]" ("Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the
CIA", Sheridan Square, 1983, p58). Deletions identified in the text just
quoted were enforced by the CIA under McGehee's legal obligations as an
ex-agent. McGehee had once had access to the CIA's secret account of the coup
and its aftermath and based his report of events on this.

At this point, a brief comment is
appropriate on Indonesia's situation in the early 1960s. In the atmosphere of
the Cold War and Communist advances in Asia, there was a peculiar set of
factors in an Indonesia fraught with seething tensions. Political conflict in
its widest sense, and the promise or threat of change, permeated the country. The
hugely popular Sukarno was charting a nationalist path independent of Western
capital and institutions, rejecting overtures and pressures from the World
Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), foreign "aid", and corporate
investment. He was trying to balance the competing forces of the army, PKI and
Muslim parties in what he called the "guided democracy" approach.
However, conservative groupings and their external backers feared that the PKI,
the only national, mass-based popular movement, might come to control the
government, even through the ballot box. The PKI had some three million members
and 12 million "front" group members. Land reform was a hot issue in
a number of areas and the PKI was often pressing hard for change to the status
quo.

"The background to the massacres
was largely a struggle for power between the Communist Party and the Army.
There was also conflict between the Communists and a powerful religious group,
religious and ideological opposition being interwoven with class conflict"
("International Action Against Genocide" by Leo Kuper, Minority
Rights Group, Report no.53, revised 1984, p8). Yet the PKI "had long
ceased to be revolutionary" and had neither the arms nor, as it strangely
proved in reality, the will to even fight back properly ("Confronting the
Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980" by Gabriel Kolko,
Pantheon Books, 1988, p180). Indeed, the passivity of the PKI in the face of
all-out assault has been something of a puzzle (see e.g. "The Indonesian
Killings of 1965-1969", pp34/5). It could well be argued that this
passivity reflected the PKI's general commitment to predominantly non-violent
change, as in fact the US Embassy's experts had concluded in developing their
strategy of totalitarian slaughter ("Confronting the Third World",
p180).

Sociologist and genocide study
specialist Leo Kuper observes that the attempted coup on September 30, 1965,
had all the appearance "of internal Army conflict". However, the
Army's response was to target the Communists. "The Army engaged actively
in the massacres of Communists, participating directly in them, or indirectly
by organising and arming civilian killers" ("International Action
Against Genocide", p8). In the broad perspective, anyone seen as an opponent
of the Army was at risk. Certain Muslim organisations, in particular, were to
the fore in carrying out many of the killings. There was significant variation
across the regions of the country in both the extent and timing of the
slaughter. Local and regional circumstances were significant in influence, and
in interaction with the Army centre of power radiating from Jakarta. The
rampages of militias backed by the Indonesian military after the East Timorese
voted for independence in 1999 afford us an insight into what the Army's
1965-66 murder campaign would have been like, only multiplied on a far, far
greater scale.Some gesture at human
rights trials is currently under way in Indonesia for the 1999 East Timor
crimes. But criminal culpability goes much deeper and wider, for the Suharto
regime and its supporters. The NATO-orchestrated Milosevic* trial serves as a
revealing contrast with the West’s record in Indonesia and treatment of
collaborators in genocide. Ironically again there is now Western concern about
Muslim terrorists from Indonesia to the Balkans. *Slobodan Milosevic, former leader of what’s left of Yugoslavia;
currently on trial, in The Hague, for genocide and massive human rights abuses.
Ed.

In 1965-66 Central and East Java were
the main killing fields for the US’ Indonesian enemies. In these areas a major
factor at work was the ancient hostility between two different Muslim groups,
one more orthodox than the other. This latter group, the santri, was evidently by comparison a land-owning, commercial
class, and it supplied a lot of the leaders and activists for the Army's
civilian-based death squads. The extent of the slaughter throughout Indonesia
led to lurid reports about rivers red with blood. In December 1965, Time reported that Communists and their
"entire families" were being killed in such numbers that small rivers
and streams "have been literally clogged with bodies"; and that the
disposal of the corpses had "created a serious santitation problem"
in parts of the country (17/12/65). Similarly, there were horror stories of
bodies floating all over the Malacca Strait, and washing up in various places
like the canals of Surabaya. As a bloodbath, the Indonesian massacre was
certainly one of the worst of the 20th Century, a fact freely admitted by the
CIA itself. Most of the killings took place in a matter of a few months, a
massively swift, systematic and savage phenomenon.

As well as the Communists and their
affiliates, along with other Leftist activists/suspects, and landless peasants,
various other categories of people suffered a similar fate. The opportunity, of
course, was taken by some individuals and groups to settle private scores of
one kind or another, or exploit communal/social resentments. For instance:
"More killing took place in West Kalimantan, although there the worst
massacres were in October and November 1967, well after the massacres had
peaked in other regions. The victims were almost exclusively Chinese, the
killers predominantly indigenous Dayaks" ("The Indonesian Killings of
1965-1966, p.25). Likewise, Chinese merchants and their families in North
Sumatra were among the victims of the genocide. In Southern Sumatra, local
Muslims murdered Javanese transmigrant settlers. In Timor, both Protestant
Christians and cargo cult followers were killed, while on Bali the defence of
Hinduism and communal feuds were significant in determining those who were
murdered.

Cutting Up The Cake

General Suharto headed the Army's
extermination programme. He gave the formal "clean out" order (Directive
No.22/KOTI/1965) and sent special Army contingents to Java to organise the
slaughter there. In stark contrast to Pol Pot*, his deeds were openly
celebrated in the "free world". To be sure, it is clear that:
"The Indonesian military takeover of 1965-66, greeted enthusiastically by
Western elites, may be considered a model form of Western-sponsored primary
terrorism . . . [and] mass imprisonments, and the imposition of permanent
martial law, returned the majority of the population to passivity. An 'open
door' was established and foreign investment soared, although the drain imposed
by the ruling elite on foreign investors through corruption was very
large" ("The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions that
Shape our View of Terror" by Edward Herman & Gerry O'Sullivan,
Pantheon Books, 1989, p15).* The late Pol Pot was the leader of the
fundamentalist Communist Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia, which carried out
an equally savage genocide there, in the 1970s. Ed.

Pilger's film, "The New Rulers of
the World" makes this sequence of events very clear. The film reveals how,
having cleansed the country of the Communists, Western capital set up shop in
Indonesia via a specially arranged conference hosted by Time-Life Corporation
in Switzerland in 1967. At this conference, the corporates met with Indonesian
government representatives and wrote the rules for foreign control of the
Indonesian economy. David Rockefeller and other top businessmen were there.
Transnational corporations (TNCs) included ICI, Siemens, British Leyland,
Heinz, General Motors, British American Tobacco (BAT), Daimler-Benz, American
Express, Chase Manhattan Bank, Warburg & Co., Dunlop, Standard Oil, US
Steel, Aluminium Co. of America, International Paper Co., and the Swiss Bank
Corp.These were the vultures to pick
over the bones of the dead as it were. Indonesia's mineral riches, and
especially oil, were a big attraction.Killings were still going on - as they did until some time in 1969. The
conference was held in Geneva, in November 1967. However, earlier in August
that year, the Stanford [University] Research Institute (SRI) had "brought
170 'senior executives' to Jakarta for a three day parley and look-see. ‘The
Indonesians have cut out the cancer that was destroying their economy', a SRI
executive later reported approvingly" ('The Berkeley Mafia and the
Indonesian Massacre' by David Ransom, in Ramparts,
October 1970, pp28/9 & 48/9, quote on p47).

In 1966, with most of the bloodbath
completed, the US Embassy and an US Agency for International Development
(AID)-sponsored "Harvard [University] economist, fresh from writing South
Korea's banking regulations", had helped Indonesian administrators write
the country's economic plans, later refined and finalised at the 1967 Geneva
conference. Selling points at the Geneva conference were: "political
stability . . . abundance of cheap labour . . . vast potential market . . .
treasurehouse of resources" (ibid.). Later, a development team from
Harvard, funded through the Ford Foundation, made sure that everything was
running according to what the foreign controllers of Indonesia had prescribed.

As David Ransom (cited above) and
others have shown, there had previously been a very extensive and coordinated
US educational, cultural and economic input into the Indonesian elite which
took power in 1965.By 1954, the
National Security Council had "decided that the US would use 'all feasible
covert means' as well as overt, including 'the use of armed force if
necessary', to prevent the richest parts of Indonesia from falling into
Communist hands" ("Confronting the Third World", p174).In particular, Ransom's research drew
attention to what he called the "Berkeley Mafia", a clique of
Indonesian economists trained at Berkeley, the University of California. These
economists had great influence on the military high command in the early 1960s,
and rose to be the mandarins of Indonesia's "modernisation" in
Suharto's New Order. Incorporated in the comprehensive American programme were
the Ford Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, RAND Corporation,
Rockefeller Foundation, and some universities, among various other bodies.
Peter Dale Scott has described this programme and its ramifications in
considerable detail (see his 'Exporting Military-Economic Development: America
and the Overthrow of Sukarno' in "Ten Years' Military Terror in
Indonesia", edited by Malcolm Caldwell, Spokesman Books, 1975, pp209/63).
By 1965, some 4,000 officers of the Indonesian armed forces had received military
training in the US, while the top staff had been schooled in integrated
"military economic" development and given a pro-American political
orientation. Writing in 1970, Ransom considered - at that stage of knowledge -
and since this politicised aid programme was so pervasive in influence, that
"neither the CIA nor the Pentagon needed to play any more than a
subordinate role" in the 1965 takeover (Ramparts, October 1970, p45). We now know that this was not true
but what is so striking from the research of analysts like Ransom and Scott is
the extent and depth of the US policy of subversion, using a whole range of
methods to effect the eventual objective.

In the several years just prior to
September 1965, while loans and aid had been severely cut back, military assistance
was actually increased, although this was also stopped in early 1965 when
Indonesia's confrontation policy with Malaysia became acute, and Sukarno had
stepped up his nationalisation of foreignoil and rubber firms. As early as 1959, the military controlled
sub-economy, which was focused on the oil company, Pertamina, led some Western
journalists to see the armed forces enforcing a "creeping coup
d'etat" ("Ten Years' Military Terror in Indonesia", p236); and
over time, too, more and more government ministries were usurped by the
military.Pertamina itself, indeed,
served as a convenient conduit for foreign money to the military. Besides
certain Western oil companies, Japanese oil firms and other Japanese interests
were connected with those plotting Sukarno's overthrow and the demise of the
PKI.

For some 30 years, the cost of
corruption for Indonesia proved to be very high with Suharto, his family and
cronies estimated to have siphoned off about US$15 billion from World Bank
loans, etc. ("The New Rulers of the World").In fact, about a third of the Bank's loans
disappeared into the pockets of the Suharto clique.But, despite this blatant abuse carried out for many years, the
World Bank was consistently fulsome in its praise for the Indonesian
government, lauding the regime as a model of development. Only when crisis was
imminent did the Bank finally become critical. All this gives some indication
as to just how profitable Western TNCs found Indonesia to be. Pertinently
enough, the US State Department had calculated in March 1966, that the
corruption of Indonesia's new elite would facilitate foreign control
("Confronting the Third World", p183).

Celebration, Cover-up And A Murky
History

Although Western agencies were to try
hard to cover up their role in the 1965-66 takeover, celebration of Suharto's
success was garishly open and callous. Time
(15/7/66) called the massacres the "West's best news for years in
Asia", displaying a picture of Suharto on the cover bearing the legend,
"Vengeance with a Smile" ("The New Rulers of the World";
"Year 501: The Conquest Continues" by Noam Chomsky, Verso, 1993,
p128). Its propaganda message was perverted enough to portray Suharto as having
an "almost innocent face", while describing the new Army regime as
"scrupulously constitutional" ("Year 501", p128).US
News & World Report enthused over an Indonesia where there was now
hope, and the New York Times
(19/6/66) saw "A Gleam of Light in Asia" ("Year 501", p128;
"The New Rulers of the World"). The general thrust of the American
media message was that anti-Communist forces had risen up to take back the
country, although the NYT's leading
political writer, James Reston, did slyly suggest a deeper US role in the whole
episode (19/6/66; "Year 501", p128).This could surely be guessed at given the very revealing US
response. At a much less visible level, from the Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamara, to the Ambassador to Indonesia, Marshall Green, American leaders
expressed great satisfaction with the results that had been achieved. By 1968,
however, when the CIA published its disinformation book on the Suharto takeover
- "Indonesia-1965: The Coup That Backfired" - the US propaganda
strategy was to further play down the role of the Indonesian Army, and to picture
the massacre as a spontaneous, uncontrollable burst of the people's fury at the
PKI, resulting in an unfortunately high body count.

A brilliant chapter in Noam Chomsky's
"Year 501" (chapter 5, 'Human Rights: The Pragmatic Criterion',
pp119/37) dissects in typically scathing fashion the covert Western, especially
American, encouragement and support for the massacres. What is so evident from
his well documented account is the utterly cynical ruthlessness of the US
leadership when dealing with those that it defines as its enemies, whether
active or potential. Only mobilised public outcry, in America and around the
world, can serve as any constraint on such activity. The leading CIA and RAND
Corp. policy analyst on Indonesia, Guy Pauker, saw things explicitly in terms
of what the Nazis did to the Communists in Germany, and thus what the
Indonesian Army should do to the PKI. Even some years before 1965, Pauker had
been advocating to the Indonesian military the need to take action and wipe out
the Communist opposition. He and others had continued to do so, and in 1969
after the massacres were virtually completed, Pauker reflected with
satisfaction that the 1965 coup attempt "elicited the ruthlessness that I
had not anticipated a year earlier and resulted in the death of large numbers
of Communist cadres" (ibid, p122).

Much mystery has been associated with
the actual coup attempt on September 30, 1965. In this attempted coup, six of
seven top military officers were murdered.Soon after, media fabrications about how these men were treated before
being killed were to play a big part "in stirring up popular resentment
against the PKI.Photographs of the
bodies of the dead generals - badly decomposed [after being dumped in a well] -
were featured in all the newspapers and on television. Stories accompanying the
pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes
gouged out by Communist women" ("Deadly Deceits", pp57/8).The September 30/1 October coup is known as
the "Gestapu" affair, with the attempt itself being crushed by the
commander of the Army's strategic command, Major-General Suharto, within fewer
than 24 hours ("The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966", p45). Aspects
about the coup attempt have led to speculation about the possible role of an
agent provocateur (or provocateurs). Was it in fact part of a more
comprehensive CIA/Suharto plot? Peter Dale Scott has evidently made the
strongest case, based on detailed analytical research, that even the coup
attempt was probably manipulated from the inside by Suharto and the CIA (Pacific Affairs, volume 58, no.2, Summer
1985).

But the swift labelling of the Gestapu
affair as a botched Communist grab for power has generally prevailed ever
since, becoming a standard item of mainstream historical writing. Whatever the
exact truth here, it is fascinating to see how the spurious Suharto/CIA version
of history has regularly got reproduced, and in the most respected histories.
For example, eminent (and very conservative) Oxford University historian, John
Roberts, has had this to say: "Food shortages and inflation led to an
attempted coup by the Communists (or so the military said), and in 1965, the
Army stood back ostentatiously while popular massacre removed the Communists to
whom Sukarno might have turned.He
himself was duly set aside the following year and a solidly anti-Communist
regime took power" ("Shorter Illustrated History of the World",
BCA, 1994, p547).So while Roberts
does signal a doubt about the nature of the coup, he goes on, incredibly
enough, to: (1) promote the blatant and easily demonstrable lie that the
military had nothing to do with the genocide; (2) actually give the massacre a
positive tone in the sense that it was purportedly "popular"; and, (3)
then give the new regime a similarly positive tone in that it was
"solidly" founded. All this can justly be called the crudest
propaganda. Even Roberts' expressed reservation about the coup seems tailored
as well to help transmit the idea of a considered, judicious judgement. Such
then is the best tradition of Western history-making on matters of this sort;
and the fate of some one million people, brutally butchered, is cavalierly
consigned to the dustbin of capitalist history.

One of the problems in investigating
the 1965-69 genocide is the lack of reliable documentary evidence of the more
specific details of what happened. Most of the killings during the peak period
- from October 1965 through to March 1966 - were dispersed in action, and done
at night in the countryside by small bands."The New Rulers of the World" claimed to show the only extant
photograph of any of the killings. Unlike the case with the atrocities of the
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Indonesian official and unofficial records are
very scanty. This seems to have been deliberate policy to a large degree so as
to not only prevent scrutiny at the time, but also obfuscate any future efforts
to establish the truth, or, worst of all, accountability.However, we do now know crucial elements
of the American and British connections to the murders.

International Mass Murder
Incorporated

Along with Marshall Green's appointment
in June 1965 as Ambassador to Indonesia during the critical period leading up to
the Gestapu affair, had been the arrival earlier in 1964 of a new, activist CIA
Chief of Station, "Bernardo Hugh Tovar, a naturalised Colombian who had
spent years in the Philippines with the CIA's Edward Lansdale in the early
1950s" ("Ten Years' Military Terror in Indonesia", p243).
Lansdale had specialised in unconventional warfare techniques against opponents
of the Filipino regime. Later, Tovar, went on to CIA dirty work in Indochina.
Thanks to the dedicated digging of researcher Kathy Kadane, we have learnt that
the CIA and American Embassy officials in Jakarta passed on the names of
Communist organisers and activists to Suharto's death squads (e.g. San Francisco Examiner, 20/5/90;
"Year 501", pp131/33). Kadane found that: "The US government
played a significant role by supplying the names of thousands of Communist
Party leaders to the Indonesian Army, which hunted down the Leftists and killed
them, former US diplomats say . . . As many as 5,000 names were furnished to
the Indonesian Army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who
had been killed or captured, according to US officials . . . The lists were a
detailed who's who of the leadership of the Party of three million members,
[foreign service Robert] Martens said" ("Year 501", p131; Examiner, 20/5/90; see also "The
Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966”, p7).

In an interview with Kadane, Robert
Martens, a former member of the US Embassy's political section (and when
interviewed, a State Department consultant), acknowledged: "It really was
a big help to the Army . . . They probably killed a lot of people, and I
probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad.There's a time when you have to strike
hard at a decisive moment" (San
Francisco Examiner, 20/5/90; also see Washington
Post, 21/5/90; Boston Globe,
23/5/90). By 1990, several American newspapers at least were willing to print
some hard material contesting the official version of events, although what
should have been seen as a sensational and most important story was in fact, as
might be expected, little used by the media. The Examiner report (20/5/90) declared that: "Silent for a quarter
century, former senior US diplomats and CIA officers described in lengthy
interviews how they aided Indonesian President Suharto, then Army leader, in
his attack on the PKI". Ex-diplomat and political section chief, Edward
Masters, who had been Martens' boss, confirmed that "CIA agents
contributed in drawing up the death lists" (ibid.). Joseph Lazarksy, who
was the deputy CIA station chief in Jakarta when Suharto took over, has
admitted that the list of names was used as a "shooting list" by the
Indonesian Army. All this, of course, was denied in 1990 by a CIA
spokesman.

"Kadane reports that top US
Embassy officials acknowledged in interviews that they had approved of the
release of the names" ("Year 501", p131). These officials
included Ambassador Marshall Green, deputy chief of mission Jack Lydman, and
Edward Masters. According to Howard Federspiel, the then Indonesia expert for
State Department intelligence: 'No one cared as long as they were Communists,
that they were being butchered; no one was getting very worked up about
it" (ibid, p131). Green has commented that: "I know we had a lot more
information [about the PKI] than the Indonesians themselves" (Examiner, 20/5/90).Likewise, Masters said that the
Indonesian intelligence was "not as comprehensive as the American
lists".Martens supplied the
American-compiled lists to an Indonesian emissary over a number of months. This
emissary was an aide to Indonesian minister Adam Malik who in turn passed them
on to Suharto's headquarters. Lazarsky disclosed that information about who had
been captured and killed came back from the Suharto command centre. "By
the end of January 1966, Lazarsky said, the checked off names were so numerous
the CIA analysts in Washington concluded the PKI leadership had been
destroyed" (ibid.). It is important to record here "that in many
cases Party members were killed along with their entire families in order to
prevent the possibility of retaliation in the future" ("The
Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966", p11; also note the Time {17/12/65} report cited earlier).

Direct US complicity in the mass
murders was actually already known from "cable traffic between the US
Embassy in Jakarta and the State Department" ("Year 501", pp123
& 132; & "Confronting the Third World", pp177/83). For
instance, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had instructed Ambassador Green on
October 29 1965, that the "campaign against PKI" must continue and
would receive US military aid to do so ("Confronting the Third
World", p181). US cable exchanges showed a high level of concern about
whether or not the army would have the resolve to carry out the genocide. On October
14 1965 Green had cabled Washington that: "Their success or failure is
going to determine our own in Indonesia for some time to come" (ibid,
p180). Later, on November 4, 1965, Green told Rusk that Embassy staff had made
it clear that the Embassy and the US government were "generally
sympathetic with and admiring of what Army doing"; and a few days later
reported that the Army was acting "ruthlessly" carrying out
"wholesale killings" (ibid, p181). Green ensured "carefully
placed assistance which will help Army cope with PKI", to facilitate what
the CIA called the "destruction" of the Party (ibid.). It needs to be
noted that relevant US documents for the three months preceding September 30
1965 have been withheld from public scrutiny. As Kolko observes, given all the
other material available, "one can only assume that the release of these
papers would embarrass the US government" (ibid, p177). As Kolko suggests,
too, the Suharto takeover could have already been planned for such an opportune
moment.

On Bali an estimated 80,000 people, or
roughly 5% of the population, were killed. "The populations of whole
villages were executed, the victims either shot with automatic weapons or
hacked to death with knives and machetes. Some of the killers were said to have
drunk the blood of their victims or to have gloated over the numbers of people
they had put to death" ("The Dark Side of Paradise: Political
Violence in Bali" by Geoffrey Robinson, Cornell University Press, 1995,
p1). In chapter 11 of his profound, in-depth study on Bali, Robinson goes into
some detail as to extent and nature of US involvement in the massacres. His
overall assessment is that: "Even if it is not possible to establish
definitively the extent of US complicity, it can be demonstrated that US policy
contributed substantially to the seizure of power by the military under Suharto
and to the massacre that ensued" (ibid, p282). As he emphasises, at least
as early as 1957, US policy initiatives had been deliberately exploiting and
encouraging "internal political cleavages in Indonesia with the intention
of bringing down the established government" (ibid). On Bali, it was the
arrival of the military with death lists and logistical support that mobilised
the slaughter on a large scale. There was an orchestrated propaganda campaign
to both instigate and legitimate the killings of those defined as the enemy.
The Western-created myth of exotic Bali as a marvellously peaceful island so
appropriate as a tourist Mecca masks a violent tradition, and Bali's part in
the 1965-66 genocide was actually not quite the aberration it might seem.

Like Kolko, Robinson has analysed and
reproduced key aspects of US documentation relating to the opportunity
presented by the Gestapu affair. "Just days after the coup, the CIA in
Jakarta telegraphed to the White House: 'The Army must act quickly if it is to
exploit its opportunity to move against the PKI': CIA Report no.14 to the White
House, 5/10/65" (ibid, p283). US officials were then well aware that the
Army was inciting popular violence against the PKI, and the strategies of
murder which were being employed. Despite its delight, the Johnson
Administration still "put on a public show of tolerant noninterference in
Indonesia's 'internal affairs'"(ibid, p284). In addition to such observations,
Robinson draws attention to several matters connected with Indonesian public
media during 1965 that are most suggestive of a typical CIA operation aimed at
destabilisation of an existing government. For instance, an inflammatory
newspaper Api Pancasila mysteriously
emerged only days after the coup attempt and later just as suddenly
disappeared, having contributed to the creation of an anti-Communist frenzy
(ibid, p285).

The Empire Soldiers On

The British connections to all this
have emerged in a variety of ways. Most damning have been the revelations from
official documents. Whereas the Foreign Office has regularly denied that
Britain was involved in the fall of Sukarno, new revelations in the mid/late
1990s showed that British Intelligence agencies and propaganda specialists
carried out covert operations to overthrow the regime. Mark Curtis, author of
"The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945" (Zed
Books, 1995), had an excoriating editorial in 1996 in The Ecologist (Vol.26, no.5, September/October, 1996, pp202/04).
Titled "Democratic Genocide", it presented his findings "from
recently declassified secret Government files".Quotes immediately below in the next three paragraphs are from
his editorial unless otherwise indicated.

Curtis states that: "The secret
files reveal three crucial aspects of the British role". The first was its
intention to get rid of Sukarno. "According to a CIA memorandum of June
1962, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and President John Kennedy 'agreed to liquidate
President Sukarno, depending on the situation and the available
opportunities'.In the late 1950s,
Britain had aided covert attempts to organise a guerrilla army to overthrow
Sukarno". By 1965, the British Ambassador to Indonesia, Sir Andrew Gilchrist,
was telling the Foreign Office that: "I have never concealed from you my
belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to
effective change" (see also "The New Rulers of the World").
Gilchrist went on in October 1965, after the Gestapu affair, to strongly press
the generals to take ruthless action against the Communists. Meantime, the US
Embassy had declared: "Now is the ideal time in some ways for the Army to
be committed to a struggle to the death with the PKI".

The second way that Curtis identifies
that Britain undermined Sukarno in the 1960s was through specific covert
operations, including carefully targeted propaganda like stories about China's
supposed links with the Indonesian Communist Party leader. Another action had
more sinister implications. Indonesia had been in confrontation with Britain
over the federation of Malaysia. Gilchrist suggested that word be passed on to
the Indonesian generals that British forces would "not attack them whilst
they are chasing the PKI. The C-in-C [British military commander in Singapore]
thinks that this has some merit and might ensure that the Army is not detracted
[sic] from what we consider to be a necessary task". This suggestion was
duly implemented, and a "secret communication was made to the Generals
through the American contact". Britain's third type of role was indeed
characterised by the "extremely close relations between the US and British
embassies in Jakarta". The US and Britain apparently agreed on supplying
arms to "Moslem and nationalist youths", i.e. the civilian-based
death squads that the Indonesian military high command was initiating and
sustaining in the field. With cynical black humour, this covert aid (weapons,
etc.) was dubbed "medicines". In "The New Rulers of the
World", Roland Challis, once a BBC correspondent in the region during
1964-69, observed that at one stage some Indonesian troops were taken by ship
from Sumatra to new killing fields in Java. The troop transport vessel sailed
down the Malacca Strait escorted by two British warships.

An insight into the meaning of free
trade in such creatively innovative situations is highlighted by a memo written
by the then Labour Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, to Prime Minister Harold
Wilson during the genocide: "It is only the economic chaos of Indonesia
which prevents that country from offering great potential opportunities to
British exporters. If there is going to be a deal with Indonesia, as I hope one
day there may be, I think we ought to take an active part and try and secure a
slice of the cake ourselves". So already, while the slaughter was in
process, British strategists were planning an Indonesia designed to fit their
business requirements. As we have seen, these plans took fruition at the conference
held in Switzerland in 1967 courtesy of Time-Life Corp. when Time and Co.
followed up their celebration of the massacres with practical facilitation of
the economic gains - at a party where they cut up the cake with the Indonesian
clients who had carried out their dirty work ("The New Rulers of the
World"). Professor Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University has pointed
out that the imposition by Western capital of such a comprehensive package on a
country at a one-off event appears so far to have been unique to Indonesia
(ibid.). Perhaps Afghanistan is the next candidate? After all, while
Afghanistan itself is resource poor it is very strategically placed for access
to the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia. The US has ambitions for a gas
pipeline from Central Asia running through Afghanistan (see e.g., NZ Listener, 13/10/01, p23).

More of the evidence of Britain's
involvement in the Indonesian genocide has been published in Paul Lashmar and
James Oliver's book, "Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1997"
(Sutton Publishers, 1998). In late 1965, Britain sent a senior Foreign Office
official and propaganda specialist to assist on the spot with the anti-Sukarno
campaign. Foreign service operative, Norman Reddaway, was given 100,000 pounds
by Foreign Office head, Joe (later Lord) Garner, to manipulate the media and
told to do anything he could to get rid of Sukarno. Reddaway has said that the
removal of Sukarno was considered a huge success, with Indonesia becoming one
of Britain's biggest customers for arms. British operations included
coordinated activity by Foreign Office personnel, MI6 (Britain’s external
Intelligence agency), and Army psychological warfare officers to spread
anti-Sukarno propaganda. Reddaway's unit aided pro-Western elements in the
Indonesian military. As well as actions based in Singapore, and directly on the
ground in Indonesia, Britain's Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ)
eavesdropping agency listened in to the Sukarno government's communications and
passed on relevant information to his military opponents.

The Disinformation Game

An article in the Guardian (1/8/01), titled "Our Bloody Coup in Indonesia:
Britain colluded in one of the worst massacres of the century" by Isabel
Hilton, has indicated that a 1966 study carried out at Cornell University
"discovered that what most of the officers [in the Gestapu Affair] had in
common was not any association with the PKI, but a connection with General
Suharto". As Hilton says "there is also evidence that the British and
US responsibility for the fall of Sukarno goes back to the event that triggered
it - an alleged Leftwing coup attempt in 1965". Lt. Col. Untung, the
supposed leader of the officers involved, was a known anti-Communist and some
of his colleagues had been trained in the US. "It has been known for more
than ten years that the CIA supplied lists of names for Suharto's assassination
squads. What is less widely known is that the supposed pro-Communist coup that
triggered the crisis was almost certainly the work of the CIA" (ibid.).
Hilton points out "that the British and American governments did not just
cover up the massacre: they had a direct hand in bringing it about"; and,
furthermore, they succeeded "in selling a false version of events that
persists to this day". An intriguing aspect of the "Gestapu"
affair is its very name. The term was allegedly coined as an acronym by an
Indonesian army officer, "presumably with the intention of investing it
with the aura of evil associated with the term 'Gestapo'" ("The Indonesian
Killings of 1965-1966", p46).Although the word would surely mean little in this sense to the average
Indonesian, it would certainly have a suitably sinister ring in the Western
media.

Roland Challis, the BBC correspondent,
"has described how British diplomats planted misleading stories in British
newspapers at the time" (Guardian,
1/8/01). Conservative media like the Atlantic
Monthly systematically whitewashed the genocide. The Atlantic Monthly assured its readers that Suharto "is regarded
by Indonesians who know him well as incorruptible . . . In attacking the
Communists, he was not acting as a Western puppet; he was doing simply what he
believed to be best for Indonesia" (Guardian,
1/8/01). This just happened to include "the granting of lucrative
concessions to Western mining and oil companies", along with such bonuses
as the buying of British military aircraft (ibid).

It is sobering to recall that not too long
ago Don McKinnon, as NZ Minister of Foreign Affairs (and now Commonwealth
Secretary General!), was telling us how Indonesia was his kind of democracy.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) was most happy to indicate
Indonesia as a development success story.In the past, too, McKinnon brazenly justified Indonesia's annexation of
East Timor where some 200,000 people, about a third of the total population,
had been killed by Suharto's forces (e.g. TV1 6pm News, 21/3/95). Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975 was
carried out with Western, including Australasian, complicity. In fact, newly
released documents show President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State, Henry
Kissinger, gave Suharto’s invasion the green light (NZ Herald, 8/12/01; Press,
8/12/01). Then, too, there has been the subjugation of West Irian. Suharto has
apparently been a bigger mass murderer than Pol Pot (compare the figures for
Khmer Rouge genocide in "The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966", p18).
NZ's dirty little collaborationist role in all of this is a story still to be
told.

Significantly enough, 1965 was the year
that NZ was "finally briefed on ASIS [Australian Secret Intelligence
Service] in order to facilitate official discussions being held in Canberra
with delegations from Wellington and London" ("Oyster: The Story of
the Australian Secret Intelligence Service" by Brian Toohey & William
Pinwill, William Heinemann, 1989, p110). Previously, the NZ government had not
been officially informed of this Intelligence agency's existence. Over the
years, ASIS was involved in various projects to destabilise the Sukarno regime.
In fact, "Sukarno's Indonesia was the main playground for ASIS attempts at
'dirty tricks'" (ibid, p96).The
working relations between the CIA and ASIS were very close.

"By June 1965, when the ANZUS*
Ministers met in Washington for their annual consultations [US] Secretary of
State Dean Rusk was voicing deep concern about the extent of Communist
influence" (ibid, p100). State Department records show that Rusk
"expected there would be some effort by various groups to prevent the PKI
from further solidifying its control" (ibid). At the very least, ASIS
played a part in creating a climate conducive to mass murder, and then joined
in American and British rejoicing at Sukarno's downfall. In point of fact here,
it was specifically praised by the US Ambassador to Australia at the time, Ed
Clark, for acting as much as it could to overthrow the Sukarno government; and
this aid included "exchanges of top level intelligence, both formal and
informal, to . . . possibly more active participation in Sukarno's
downfall" (ibid, p102). Even the CIA relied a lot on ASIS reporting in
1966 when Indonesia was in turmoil. A Captain Edward Kenny later testified that
he had worked as an ASIS operative in the destabilisation programme but had
resigned in disgust over the bloodbath. Critical to the covert action, he
claimed, was the bribing of high-ranking Indonesian military officers. Whatever
the exact mechanisms of destabilisation involved, the NZ government - certainly
some key politicians and officials - must have been well aware of much of the
real story of events. Along with trade and investment ties, until relatively
recently NZ had also been a military partner of the Suharto regime, training
personnel and selling equipment. *ANZUS –
the 1951 military treaty between Australia, NZ and the US. The US unilaterally
suspended NZ from it, in 1986, as punishment for NZ’s nuclear free policy. It
still exists between Australia and the US. But as far as New Zealand is
concerned, it is dead. Ed.

The maxim that truth is the first
casualty of war is an old wisdom. But in 2002 it is more vital than ever to
keep it in mind. During the Cold War, a constant refrain of the free press was
the Communist atrocity story.Whether
fact or fiction depending on the occasion, the theme was a recurring one. The
obvious implication was that the Communist foe used methods of political
control that the West and its allies would never stoop to use. Instead, values
that the West supposedly stood for like freedom and democracy meant that
Western forces consistently kept some measure of human decency in tailoring
means to ends. Yet the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide clearly showed that any
supposed regard for human rights could even be openly discounted in the media
celebration of a particularly gruesome outcome. To carry this off convincingly,
the right propaganda spin was critical. For the most part it was essential to
deny any Western responsibility, or at least only admit this to a carefully
calculated degree, and then only in a properly contrived context. So in the
Indonesian case, as we have seen, the massacres were presented as the outraged
response to a botched Communist takeover; a spontaneous, uncontrollable
uprising of the masses; a desperate mobilisation in self-defence, etc. The
victims were systematically dehumanised in all sorts of ways - some general in
technique, others very much adapted to cultural and regional/local factors.

Cover-up Continues -
"Ignorance is Strength"

With regard to the media, my own
personal experience of the treatment by Christchurch's Press of the Indonesian genocide has proved very illuminating. Some
of this was once written up and published in Peace Researcher (first series, no.13, June 1987), as 'The Free
Press and the CIA'. This particular piece was prompted by the initial refusal
of the Press to publish a letter of
mine to the Editor, originally sent in September 1986. My letter had contended
that certain recent items in the Press
on Indonesia showed how CIA-inspired propaganda works in the West. In the
letter I specifically took up the issue of the Gestapu affair and the alleged
Communist coup. I had included the statement that analysts like Peter Dale
Scott "demonstrate that even the coup attempt was manipulated from the
inside by Suharto and the CIA. This coup attempt was the excuse for the planned
systematic murder of Communist and other groups".

After a direct personal approach and
remonstrance with the then Editor, the matter of actual publication was
resolved and my letter duly appeared. Various other related matters came to
converge with this particular concern and so a Peace Researcher article took shape as well. The Press is a long time apologist for US foreign
policy, whatever the crime, and has regularly used the atrocity story against
American enemies while covering up and protecting the perpetrators of Western
terrorism.In Suharto's case, applying
the pragmatic criterion of human rights, it turned against him like other media
when the Indonesian President had obviously reached his "use-by"
date.

In October 2000, there was a sense of deja vu when a letter of mine to the Press Editor was similarly declined on the
topic of the Indonesian genocide. Ironically enough, the Press has a Latin motto proclaiming that "there is nothing
useful which is not honourable"; and advertises itself as dealing with
"every issue". My October 2000 letter was another comment on a Press article about Suharto, the Gestapu
affair and the massacre. Following the non-appearance of my letter, I next
resubmitted it by hand, once more unsuccessfully. This time, I decided against
going into the newspaper offices and trying to argue with the editor over the
matter. Rather it is best written up here as yet another example of the
continuing general cover-up of Western participation in the genocide.First of all, the letter is reproduced as
follows:

"Peter Fry's article blaming
former President Suharto for the genocide of Communists, Chinese and other
peoples in Indonesia during 1965-67 (Press,
2/10/00, p9) only tells part of the story. The massacres were deliberately
planned and orchestrated by key Intelligence and military forces within the Western
alliance.There is now ample
documentation and admission of what really happened. In his book, 'Deadly
Deceits', former CIA agent Ralph McGehee revealed how the Agency falsely
portrayed the coup attempt against Sukarno as 'Communist', and how the CIA
embraced the whole episode, including the massacres, as a model for future
covert Third World interventions.American and British embassy staff in Indonesia drew up hit lists of
victims for Suharto's death squads as shown for example by declassified British
files described in The Ecologist,
vol.26, no.5, September/October 1996, p202. Today, Suharto is a scapegoat for
the Western betrayal of the Indonesian people".

Ever since economic crisis hit
Indonesia and the Suharto regime started to crumble, the West has been
disassociating itself from the regime and placing all the blame for Indonesia's
woes on the notoriously corrupt ruling family. This has been a standard, well
practised tactic with a number of dictators that the West, particularly the US,
has strongly supported in the past. These rulers have been ditched at strategic
points, and the transition then made (or attempted) to the establishment of
more acceptable rulers. Dramatic examples of this well tried practice include
Marcos in the Philippines, "Baby Doc" Duvalier in Haiti, and Mobutu
in Zaire/Congo. On the eve of the new Millennium, and in completely cynical
fashion, Time actually launched its
own campaign on Suharto's abuse of the Indonesian economy. The World Bank's
development model was now the target of unashamedly hypocritical criticism, and
not only by the Bank. A May 1999 cover story of Time (24/5/99) grandly proclaimed: "Suharto's Billions. Luxury
homes, fine art and private jets - our special investigation undercovers the
former Indonesian leader's staggering family fortune" (see also Murray
Horton's cover story on the NZ connections in Foreign Control Watchdog, no.92, December 1999).So this media wing of the Time-Life
Corporation which hosted the 1967 business conference in Switzerland, a meeting
that wrote the rules for foreign investment and trade in Indonesia, has now
rounded quite nastily on its former client, a dictator whom it helped protect
for many years. The political economy of the media and human rights is most
fascinating.

Myth-making And New Spin

As indicated, my letter to the Editor
of the Press in October 2000 was
directed against an article by Peter Fry, billed as "formerly an Army
colonel and defence attache in Indonesia". The headlines for his article
read: "Suharto's double double-cross: As Indonesia grapples with Suharto's
legacy of corruption, Peter Fry questions the role the general played in the
1965 coup". It was a most interesting article with not a hint of Western
involvement in the whole episode. Suharto, the coup makers, the PKI and Sukarno
shared all the blame, with Suharto coming in for special attention. A summary
of Fry's article is needed for an adequate examination of what he had to say.
Until indicated, the quotes below come from his Press article. Fry maintained that: "On the eve of the coup,
the PKI were confidantes to the President and at the brink of achieving
political power through legal and peaceful means, while their arch-enemy, the
Indonesian Army, was becoming increasingly at odds with Mr Sukarno". As
Fry rightly puts it, the official story that the PKI plotted and engineered the
Gestapu affair does not make sense. "It seems unlikely that the PKI,
poised to assume power legally, would have chanced its future on such an
unpredictable mechanism as a violent coup d'etat". Fry goes on to portray
the coup attempt as a revolt by disillusioned officers, who invited PKI
participation at a late stage, and that the PKI leadership then "gave the
plan its cautious support". He suggests that somehow Sukarno was in on it
too and would announce his support for the coup makers at the appropriate
moment.

However, as Fry points out, the
plotters had inexplicably failed to ensure that Major-General Suharto was
included on the list of generals to be purged. This was the result, Fry
suggests, of Suharto's "double double-cross" of the coup makers
whereby Suharto was "fully part of the conspiracy" which he then
betrayed.Next, to save the Army's
image, Suharto used the PKI as a scapegoat, picturing the Party as the
instigator of the plot all along.In
Fry's words: "The Communists were easily blamed, but more was possible.
Their guilt could be managed to obliterate all trace of Army complicity and
eliminate the PKI. For the people of Indonesia the worst was to come. The
horror was yet to be played out". Fry goes on to emphasise the butchery
and how: "The forces of retribution were unleashed, masked as spontaneous
acts of revenge by local people". He concludes by saying, whatever the
truth of Suharto's role in the coup attempt, "he did not fail to seize the
opportunities presented to him, and in the bloody aftermath, ruthlessly
destroyed the PKI and its supporters".

Fry's Press piece fits in with the recent Western approach of putting
most of the blame for the genocide on Suharto, and certainly avoiding any
Western responsibility. Some progress has been made, I suppose, in one sense.
My 1986 letter to the Editor alleged that Suharto and the CIA manipulated the
1965 coup attempt from inside. Now we have reached the stage where Suharto's
role at least is being suggested by Establishment sources. On the other hand,
of course, CIA connections to mass murder have always been highly sensitive and
this is now especially true in the new era, after September 11, 2001, of the
US/British "war on terrorism". US government politicians and
officials do not want the ghosts of previous American State-sponsored terrorist
campaigns to come back and haunt them. In 1994 a lengthy US State Department
document was released that disclosed details of major covert operations
conducted by the CIA in Indonesia during the 1950s. It showed how the
Eisenhower Administration secretly intervened in backing armed opposition
groups on the islands of Sulawesi and Sumatra, supplying advisers, arms and
communications equipment among other things. This bid to overthrow Sukarno had
been in reaction to his efforts to nationalise Western commercial
enterprises.But in 2001 a State
Department study of the 1965-66 events in Indonesia was suppressed from public
scrutiny by the Bush Administration. And this was even before the "war on
terrorism"!

Controversy in the US over the State
Department book was reported in July 2001 (Radio NZ, 29/7/01; Independent [London], 20/7/01). A copy of
it was accidentally obtained in the US by the National Security Archive, an
organisation that campaigns for access to declassified official documents. This
State Department study is very revealing of the US role in the massacres. It
further documents diplomatic cables showing how the US Embassy supplied the
names of Communist Party members to the Indonesian army in Jakarta, and also
American funding for a militia group (death squad). It shows, too, how the US
worked to lower estimates of the number of people killed, and discloses that
the US information given to the Indonesian military high command contributed to
the murder of more than 100,000 PKI members. One of the documents sent to
Washington states: "The chances of detection . . . of our support in this
instance are as minimal as any black bag operation can be" (Independent, 20/7/01). According to the
Archive, the book says that in December 1965, Marshall Green, as US Ambassador,
"endorsed a 50 million rupiah (3,500 pounds) covert payment to the Kap-Gestapu
movement leading the repression" (ibid). "Kap-Gestapu" was a
special, militant anti-Communist group set up by the Army to spearhead the
genocide - literally "action command to crush Gestapu". NB. The
Archive has posted one of two disputed volumes on http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/

More widely interpreted, this then is
what the American idea of freedom means for the Third World, today most
dramatically represented by Bush's "war on terrorism". Any resistance
to US-led globalisation is to be similarly crushed, one way or another.
Globalisation supposedly represents the inexorable advance of Western
civilisation to which the rest of the world has to conform or else . . . Ex-Ambassador
Green once "told writer Tad Szulc of a 1967 interview he had with Richard
Nixon. Green said, 'The Indonesian experience had been one of particular
interest to [Nixon] because things had gone well in Indonesia. I think he was
very interested in that whole experience as pointing to the way we should
handle our relationships on a wider basis in Southeast Asia generally, and
maybe in the world'" (In These Times,
July 4-17, 1990).With President Bush
unleashing the CIA and covert operations against anybody whom this very
Rightwing Administration considers a "terrorist", it is most likely
that the Indonesian model will be dusted off and implemented again (for a rare
academic scrutiny of Western terrorism, see “Western State Terrorism”, ed. Alex
George, Polity-Blackwell, 1991).

The Indonesian Model -
"Jakarta is Coming!"

After the fall of Suharto, despite
continuing efforts by much of the Western Establishment to cover up the record
of destabilisation of the Sukarno government, it is becoming easier for those
concerned to research and communicate on the issue. In particular, the
Indonesian Institute for the Study of the 1965/66 Massacre - Yayasan Penelitian
Korban Pembunuhan 1965/1966 - is engaged in this work. In March 2001, it
declared that: "After the downfall of Suharto's military regime, it is now
possible at last to carry out serious research regarding the extent of the
massacres, as well as the imprisonments, and flagrant abuses of power
perpetrated during more than 30 years of the Suharto regime, a regime which has
brought Indonesia to its knees economically, morally and socially" (the
Institute’s e-mail address is: korban65_66@hotmail.com).

The militarised national security state
instituted by Suharto has been scrutinised in the past, to some extent at
least. Ten years after the military takeover in 1965, it was estimated that
about 100,000 political prisoners were still being held "in a vast number
of prisons, detention centres, work camps and military units" ("Ten
Years' Military Terror in Indonesia", p100). Known as "tapols"
(from "tahanan politik", meaning political prisoner), the jails were
regularly replenished with inmates following arrests on the pretext of alleged
involvement, directly or indirectly, in the Gestapu affair. Likewise, some
years later, researchers found that: "More than 15 years after the coup
[attempt], the regime's sustained anti-Communist propaganda and terror campaign
effectively continues" ("Indonesia: Law, Propaganda and Terror"
by Julie Southwood & Patrick Flanagan, Zed Books, 1983, p133). This pattern
was long to prevail.

Most grotesquely, in Stalinist fashion,
supposed leading Gestapu participants were periodically executed after show
trials in order to remind the populace of the importance of obedience to governmental
authority, and this practice carried on into the 1990s. Writing in July 1990,
Joel Bleifuss observed that "since 1985, 20 people have been executed for
their alleged role in the coup or for membership in the PKI. These deaths were
a product of Indonesia's formal judicial system. That was not the case,
however, with the so-called ‘mysterious killings’ of some 5,000 Indonesians
during the ‘anti-crime’ campaigns of 1983/86. President Suharto writes in his
1989 autobiography that these deaths were in fact officially sanctioned summary
executions of suspected criminals" (In
These Times, July 4-17, 1990). The legacy of the genocide was obviously a
lasting one throughout the 32 years of Suharto's rule; and it took many and
diverse forms.

As indicated earlier, ex-CIA agent
Ralph McGehee has flagged the significance of the CIA's Indonesian 1965-66
operation as a model for other covert operations. Among a range of aspects,
there are certain features we can readily identify: (1) cultivation of Rightwing
military elements; (2) using an alleged atrocity to inflame public opinion; (3)
general media manipulation to incite violent reaction; (4) instigation and
logistic support for civilian vigilante groups; (5) swift and hard coordinated
response targeted at the mass elimination of opponents, or potential opponents;
and, (6) a continuing programme of disinformation and cover-up.Since some of these principles, if not
all, were already standard guidelines for US covert operations, the perceived
US success might have resided in the overall package and its secret, effective
coordination.Perhaps manipulation of
the Gestapu affair was the key element. At one point in his book, "Deadly
Deceits", McGehee refers to the "CIA [one word deleted]
operation" (p57). Peter Dale Scott has suggested that the missing word is
"deception" ("Year
501", p123). Peter Fry, please take note. Whatever the exact success of
the deception performed, there is no doubt that the greatest sense of US
satisfaction came from wiping out the PKI.

When he visited Aotearoa/NZ in 1986,
McGehee told us that probably the clearest example of the model's application
was the Pinochet* takeover in Chile in 1973. This CIA operation involved agents
like Dr Ray Cline who later tried to set up a so-called "ANZUS think
tank" here at the time of the mid-1980's crisis over visits by American
nuclear warships to NZ. As part of the psychological warfare programme leading
up to the Pinochet coup in Chile, the warning slogans, "Jakarta, Jakarta",
and "Jakarta is coming", were painted on walls around Santiago.
"Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973", a staff report to a US Senate
Select Committee, showed that: "In addition to support for political
parties, the CIA mounted a massive, anti-Communist propaganda campaign.
Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, direct mailing, paper streamers, and wall painting. It was a 'scare
campaign' . . ." (US Govt., 1975, p15). This campaign was aimed at goading
the political opposition "or the Chilean military into action" (ibid,
p23). *General Pinochet, dictator of
Chile, 1973-90. A particularly brutal military coup overthrew the elected
Leftwing government, headed by President Allende, who was amongst the thousands
killed. Ed.

Among media-related activities, Time magazine was put on the right track
by the CIA in its story line on Chile (ibid, p25). Indeed, in a six week
period, according to the CIA itself, "partial returns showed that 726
articles, broadcasts, editorials, and similar items directly resulted from
Agency activity" with regard to the Latin American and European media
(ibid.). Most significantly, the CIA engaged in a "deception operation" to influence the Chilean military against
the Allende government (ibid, pp37/9). When he visited Aotearoa/NZ in 1986,
Ralph McGehee told us it was the CIA's boast that it could play on the world's
media like a giant Wurlitzer (pipe organ). Locally, it is interesting to note
that one of the Press's editorial
staff is so enamoured of CIA operations during the Cold War that he sees the
secret funding by the Agency of Encounter
* and other magazines as "one of the most extraordinarily beneficial
pieces of patronage in modern times and certainly one of the more benign
instances of secret spending ever to occur". Indeed, for this journalist
"the CIA helped save Western culture" and evidently the tradition of
the free press (Press, 9/8/00). *Monthly magazine of art, literature,
politics, funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front. Published a
number of the leading Western writers during the Cold War years. Ed.

Besides the 1973 Chilean coup, among
the many other coups in which the CIA has been a prime agent after Indonesia
1965, was that in Cambodia in 1970, of which many observers noted the same
complex of CIA plotters, Japanese secret societies and oil interests behind the
military takeover there. Even Suharto's Army was implicated ("Ten Years'
Military Terror in Indonesia", pp239/40). “Suharto remained ‘our kind of
guy’, as the Clinton Administration called him, as he compiled one of the most
horrendous records of slaughter and other abuses of the late 20th
Century” (“September 11”, Noam Chomsky, Allen and Unwin, 2001, pp 78/79).

Friendly Fascism

Obviously the wholesale elimination of
opponents is a central feature of the covert coup operations which the US has
repeatedly put into effect. In this connection, it is worth recording that
Marshall Green went on to oversee the American bombing of neutral Cambodia for
the State Department in the Vietnam War, apparently drawing lessons from his
Indonesian experience. "As the bombing was stepped up to historically
unprecedented levels in 1973, slaughtering tens of thousands of peasants, Green
testified before Congress that the massacre should continue because of our
desire for peace . . . ", appealing here to the alleged success in forcing
concessions by bombing Hanoi in 1972 ("Year 501", p127).Green well knew that the Hanoi success was a
lie - yet another untruth conveniently "concealed by the Free Press"
- and therefore he "could be confident that there would be no exposure of
his colossal fabrications in the interest of continued mass murder"
(ibid). The bombing of Cambodia was an initially covert operation that in the
end accountedfor about 600,000 deaths
over six years, as estimated by the CIA (Pilger interview, Radio NZ,
22/9/01).Significantly enough, the
CIA recognised at the time that this bombing campaign was helping create the
Khmer Rouge. Consequently, Green was an agent in two of the US's mass killings
in the 20th Century, and indirectly also an agent of the barbarism inflicted on
Cambodia by Pol Pot and his henchmen. Pol Pot was even supported by the West in
various ways following the 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

As a master diplomat for Washington,
among further similar achievements, Green's track record also includes
"direct experience of the CIA-sponsored replacement of President Syngman
Rhee by the military regime of Chung Hee Park" when he was a US Foreign
Service Officer in Seoul, South Korea, in 1960 ("Ten Years' Military
Terror in Indonesia", p243).Rhee
resigned because of student-led disorder and Peter Dale Scott suggests that one
of Green's qualifications for the Ambassador's post in Indonesia in 1965 was his
proven ability at fomenting violent student movements. "Because of the
role of students in that eventual military takeover [Park's coup], Green was
widely suspected in Indonesia of encouraging the student activists in the
post-coup purge of the PKI" (ibid, p244). Later, Green was US Ambassador
at the time of the Whitlam Labor government’s fall in Australia in 1975. The
CIA and other spy and covert action agencies were accused of engineering the
fall, and there is much evidence for that interpretation, including the
"panic" shown by the CIA over Whitlam's intention to name a CIA agent
in connection with the US Pine Gap spy base in Australia (see e.g.
"Oyster", pp177/80).

One Australian Labor Government
Minister has reported an earlier threat made by Green "that if Labor
handed control and ownership of US multinational subsidiaries to the Australian
people 'we would move in'" ("Rooted in Secrecy: The Clandestine
Element in Australian Politics" by Joan Coxsedge et al, Campaign Against
Political Police, 1982, p24). With regard to Indonesia, Green regularly told
Australian audiences that when he was there in the mid-1960s: "we did what
we had to do and you'd better be glad we did because if we hadn't Asia would be
a different place today" ("Ten Years' Military Terror in
Indonesia", p244; "The CIA: A Forgotten History" by William
Blum, Zed Books, 1986, p220). The pragmatic criterion of human rights is ever
triumphant, but may ultimately eventuate in unpleasant consequences as well.

A lovely Press puff-piece by Christopher Moore on Green's visit to
Aotearoa/NZ in 1988 had this to say about the master diplomat: "For nearly
40 years, he trod the delicate tightrope of power politics with considerable
skill. The archetypal New Englander, Marshall Green treats life with flinty
personal integrity, a bemused view of human foibles and a robust, no-nonsense
approach which has seen him confronting student mobs in Jakarta and devious
politicians in Washington DC, with the manner of a strict but benign
headmaster" (16/3/88). Such then is the Free Press's portrayal of a man
bloodied with the terrorist mass murders of Indonesian and Cambodian peasants.
Fittingly, it was observed that Green, after his retirement from the foreign
service, was still "active in foreign affairs think tanks and groups
examining the world population crisis" (ibid.). For sure, Green was then a
director of the Population Crisis Committee. The urbane New Englander had
certainly made his own peculiarly personal contribution to this crisis through
wholesale slaughter. With a final thoughtful touch, the Press article ends on Green's considered wish: "I hope that
throughout it all I have always remained a realistic humanitarian" (ibid).
Exactly.Ironically, 1988, the year of
Green's visit to NZ was also the year of publication of Gabriel Kolko's book,
"Confronting the Third World" (cited above), which presented the
damning evidence from cable traffic of Green's role in the perpetration of the
Indonesian genocide.

Another puff-piece in the Dominion Sunday Times (28/2/88) by
Richard Long on Green's 1988 visit was equally enlightening. Long commented
that: "He was appointed Ambassador to Jakarta in 1965 when the moderates
managed to defeat President Sukarno's Communist takeover attempt". We thus
have a very neat summary of Western disinformation here from Long who was well
known to be close to the US Embassy in Wellington. A standard item in the
disinformation package is the line that fascist-style mass murderers are
"moderates" ("Year 501", chapter 5). Long went on to
present Green as "far from being an old hawk" - to be sure, the old
boy sounded "positively dovish on some issues" (Dominion Sunday Times, 28/2/88). Green praised the Indonesians who
had the "great courage to oppose Sukarno"; and said this courage was
"demonstrated, not just by the military, but also by other elements
throughout the Indonesian bureaucracy and society" (ibid.). Besides all
the propaganda previously described, it should be noted that by mid-1964
President Sukarno had become seriously ill (he died in 1970 in a state of
virtual house arrest). The only concession by Long to any doubts about Green's
record was the observation that Green maintained "there are great
fallacies in the conspiracy theories attempting to link Washington to coups and
overthrows in the region", including Whitlam's fall (ibid). In the
Indonesian case, the problem for Mr. Green's historical integrity is all the
incriminating documentary evidence accumulated in his own name.

Fighting The "War on Terrorism"

In pursuit of the US "war on
terrorism", President Bush has announced his intention to institute
secret, military tribunals to try any captured non-American terrorists for
their crimes, with execution to follow within 30 days (of course, New Zealand is ahead of the world on this one. As far back
as 1989, Mike Moore, our blink-and-miss-him Prime Minister and currently the
Director General of the World Trade Organisation, talked of the new global
problem of terrorism and called for the NZ military to have the death penalty
for treason. Holmes, TVNZ, 14/6/89.
Ed). Meantime, US treatment of prisoners taken from Afghanistan to their
military base in Cuba is arousing worldwide concern, as well as (to a
regrettably far lesser extent) treatment of prisoners within Afghanistan
itself. In connection with the latter, Physicians for Human Rights, an American
group, has drawn attention to thousands of captives suffering terrible
conditions and even dying from their plight (Press, 30/1/02). Many of the world's worst terrorists are obviously
living in Washington and elsewhere in the US, and the President's own father
could be considered to be among them; but the danger for the future is that not
only will they remain unaccountable, but that there will soon be a new Orwellian
institution operated unilaterally by the world's self-appointed guardian of
freedom and democracy. Such moves will project Western hypocrisy on a scale
that will further erode any respect for Western professions of justice in the
eyes of so many of the world's peoples.

The US has, of course, strenuously
resisted the application of impartially constituted international law and
courts which can adjudicate on crimes done against human rights in the conduct
of its foreign policy - like support for the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s;
and its sponsorship of death squad slaughter in Guatemala, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, etc. The aim of the Bush Administration is clearly to fight
terrorism with terrorism, mobilising what has been called "The Real Terror
Network" (see Edward Herman's superb book of the same name - South End
Press, 1982).As the mainstream Western
media have done so assiduously in the past, the prevalent practice will be to
protect and whitewash the US and its allies from any responsibility, let alone
accountability for human rights abuses (see “Globalisation Into Global War?”, Foreign Control Waatchdog 98, December
2001, pp14-26).

Already atrocities, summary executions
and massacres have been carried out by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in
a campaign supposedly about stopping terrorism, and Western forces are
implicated. This sort of crime has been perpetrated virtually with the
collaboration of much of the Western media on the spot who openly took the side
of the Alliance, a militia which has a grim history of repression and butchery
that it is now blatantly extending (for
example, see Time, 26/11/01, for a
two page colour photo spread of Northern Alliance soldiers murdering a wounded
Taliban. Ed). Moreover, the American Administration has stated that a lot
of its "war on terrorism" will be carried out in secret so human
rights abuses are likely to be routine and extensive in the new wave of dirty
warfare. In the meantime, the Pentagon has again hired the Rendon Group, an American
public relations company, to sell its war on Afghanistan. Rendon was the outfit
which put out the propaganda lie about Iraqi soldiers killing babies during the
1991 Gulf War, and has apparently worked with the CIA to further demonise Iraqi
leader, Saddam Hussein.

US leaders like the Defense Secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld and his Deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have made brazenly clear their
desire to kill as many of the Taliban, and especially the foreign volunteers,
as they can, seeing them as part of the Al Qaeda network. Ironically, a number
of the foreign volunteers in Afghanistan were originally recruited under US
auspices to fight the 1979-89 Russian invasion. American Defense Department
spokesmen have been regularly placing a lot of public emphasis on killing those
they see as the enemy. In its asymmetrical war strategy, first implemented on a
major scale in the 1991 Gulf War, a technology-weak and often poverty-stricken
enemy is blasted with Cruise missiles, bombers and high-tech weapons from a
safe distance. Special forces are used for reconnaissance, intelligence
operations, targeting, quick raids, and for finishing off the enemy.As the West's dirty warriors, special forces
have often been involved in death squad operations, whether directly or
indirectly as initiators and facilitators, as part of the strategy of so-called
"low intensity" warfare (Peace
Researcher, first series, special issue: "NZ Ready Reactionaries
Practise Repression", no.29, August 1991). In 2002 and beyond, the
American Administration is out to violently eliminate as many of its
"terrorist" opponents as it thinks world opinion can tolerate.

Again, in this connection too, the
advantages of the Indonesian model are plainly evident: in the future, the US
will be seeking opportunities for mass slaughter of those it targets, and
wherever this can be engineered covertly the better. This can mean employing
proxies as much as possible to fight and wipe out the enemy in any ground
fighting. "Former CIA Director William Colby, in an interview, compared
the [US] Embassy's campaign [in Indonesia] to identify the PKI leadership to
the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam. In 1965, Colby was the director of the
CIA's Far East division and was responsible for directing US covert strategy in
Asia" (San Francisco Examiner,
20/5/90). When in 1962 he took over this position, Colby "said he
discovered the US did not have comprehensive lists of PKI activists" in
Indonesia, and he identified this "as a gap in the intelligence
system" (ibid.).He was then obviously
instrumental in taking action to remedy this situation. Colby had been strongly
criticised following disclosure of human rights abuses in the Phoenix Program,
and in 1990 he was appealing in the public arena to the Indonesian 1965-66
model as justification for the strategy of targeting selected individual
opponents.

Phoenix was basically an assassination
project run by US special forces and aimed at cadres of the National Liberation
Front (popularly known as the Viet Cong). The far greater visibility of the
Vietnam War had led to political and media scrutiny of Phoenix and the probable
41,000 death toll that it had exacted ("The CIA: A Forgotten
History", p145). Ever since, exposure of the Phoenix operation has been a
sore point with the American unconventional warfare establishment (e.g. see
"Special Men and Special Missions: Inside American Special Operations
Forces 1945 to the Present" by J Nadel & J Wright, Greenhill Books,
1994, p114). Hence the concerted Western publishing/film programme to glamourise
special forces and their employment; similarly to some degree for the CIA.
However, as Douglas Valentine, author of “The Phoenix Program” (William Morrow
& Co., 1990) warns us, “Phoenix” is reborn; “Wherever governments of the
Left or Right use military and security forces to enforce their ideologies
under the aegis of anti-terrorism…But, most of all, look for Phoenix in the
imaginations of ideologues obsessed with security, who seek to impose their way
of thinking on everyone else” (pp. 428/29).

Michael Ignatieff has coined the term
"virtual war" to describe those Western interventions in the
post-Cold War era that have sought "to achieve their ends at the lowest
possible military cost", at least for the Western forces making war
("Virtual War: Kosovo And Beyond", Chatto & Windus, 2000, p162).
Virtual war in his terms refers to the sort of war that the North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation (NATO) conducted over Kosovo where: hostilities are not
formally declared as according to traditional practice; fighting is almost
totally one-sided with high-tech weapons wielded at will overwhelmingly by one
of the participants; legal questions are constantly canvassed; Western
audiences view the conflict on television in some ways as a sort of video game;
and where the outcomes are left indeterminate to a large degree. Such virtual
wars are relatively remote in concern for Western publics, although
international opinion still has limits of tolerance of the level and extent of
violence. September 11, 2001 has changed much of this with the virtual war on
Kosovo dramatically contrasted with the current war on Afghanistan, and the
more general "war on terrorism".Western publics are now far more involved in what is being sold as a
continuing global struggle to the death.In this connection, Ignatieff's warning about the potential for
escalation of "violence which moralises itself as justice and which is
unrestrained by consequences" stands as ever more urgent (ibid, p163 and
concluding pp214/15). As Ignatieff also aptly declares, "deceptions have
become intrinsic to the art of war" and therefore "a good citizen is
a highly suspicious one" (ibid, p196).

Guy Pauker, who as we have seen was one
of the policy architects of the Indonesian genocide, went on after the successful
implementation of his advice in this Asian country, to examine the world
situation and the prospects for continued American rule. Most significantly,
" . . . the struggle for control of the world's resources between the
advanced industrial powers (the 'North') and the underdeveloped countries of
the Third World (the 'South')" came to be seen by Pauker and many other
Rightwing analysts "as the most explosive threat to long-term US
security" ("Beyond the Vietnam Syndrome: US Interventionism in the 1980s"
by Michael Klare, IPS, 1981, p23). Pauker gave this outlook "further
articulation in a widely-discussed 1977 RAND Corp. report" where he
considered the prospect "that mankind is entering a period of increased
social instability and faces the possibility of a breakdown of global order as
a result of sharpening confrontation between the Third World and the industrial
democracies" (ibid). Pauker was then looking ahead to the 1980s when he
thought there was a growing likelihood of such conflict erupting. In the
intervening years between 1977 and 2001, while there have been serious armed
conflicts none of these has thankfully generalised on to wider fronts. However,
a lot of world problems have only got worse, and the West seems to be getting
mired in the Middle East and Central Asia with the planet's diminishing oil and
gas reserves at stake.

Brave New Wars?

As New World Disorder reigns, President
Bush has labelled the US/British war on Afghanistan the first war of the 21st
Century, while warning countries from Iraq to North Korea that they could well
be next on the US hit list. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, Suharto's New Order, long
legitimated by the US until just recently, has ended in ignominy, debacle and
disgrace with deep uncertainty for the near future. It has all unravelled to
such a degree that the country is now being seen as a huge potential risk to
Western prosperity and security with a predominantly Muslim population of some
220 million close to Australasia. Presently ruled by a precariously stable
government, Indonesia is charged with volatile issues ranging from secessionist
movements to political legitimacy at the centre.The country could well become another candidate for the US
"war on terrorism", at least in the sense of certain targeted groups
and areas. Australasian forces have intervened in East Timor for ostensibly
humanitarian reasons but how much has Australia (and other Western powers) got
an eye on oil and gas resources, let alone other minerals?We should recall here that implicit in the
US National Security Council strategy on Indonesia in the 1950s was the
possible de facto partition of the country. This is a strategy that the US and
other Western states have successfully implemented in Africa and other parts of
the Third World.

Free trade and investment are core
elements of the globalisation cultural package that the US and the rest of the
West want to roll over the Third World, now meeting especial resistance in
regions with large Muslim populations. It was surely salutary that Indonesia
was a country which, even on official projections, was deemed one of the least
likely to benefit from the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade)
Uruguay Round that closed in the mid-1990s.As GATT changed into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the conflicts
that are generating the terrorist wars of the early 21st Century only increased
in tension. Just one of the many contradictions inherent in all of this is that
between US national security and its commitment to free trade and open markets
(suitably defined and manipulated), and thus the export of military technology
worldwide, enabling other countries to strengthen their capacity to eventually
challenge the US more effectively ("Virtual War", p210).

American intervention in Indonesia has
demonstrated the pitfalls of economic and military policies toward the Third
World that threaten to haunt us all for the foreseeable future unless those who
care can rally sufficient support in the years ahead. Terrorism threatens to be
employed continually in a truly vicious cycle.Breaking this cycle will take concerted commitment (see the
latest Covert Action Quarterly, 71,
Winter 2001 for some relevant articles. www.covertactionquarterly.org).